Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to storage and tracking cabinets and arrangements. In particular, the present invention relates to an item storage arrangement system and a system and method for decreasing scan time while increasing accuracy.
Description of Related Art
Presently, in the health care industry, complex and expensive equipment and systems are utilized in the diagnosis and care processes. As the development of this equipment and associated systems continues, the necessity to monitor and track the usage of equipment is of the utmost importance. Certain drawbacks and deficiencies exist in the prior art, including: (1) theft of the equipment or its components; (2) inaccurate manual compliance and tracking methods; (3) ineffective and inefficient compliance monitoring and similar management; (4) inefficient equipment sharing and distribution; (5) difficulty in tracking; (6) inaccurate identification and tracking methods; (7) problems identifying specific items from a plurality of items, etc.
In hospitals, items, such as catheters, are stored in large cabinets with RFID tagged catheters hung from hangers with antenna modules interspersed between each of the catheters. Each time the cabinet door is closed, the cabinet locks and the catheter RFID tags are scanned. During this time, the cabinet remains locked until the scan is complete. Once the scan is complete, hospital staff members are able to open the unlocked doors and take the needed catheters. In this way, the hospital tracks the usage and inventory of catheters by scanning the inventory every time the cabinet is opened and closed.
This system presents several advantages, the first and foremost being the more efficient monitoring of items and equipment. This allows hospitals to monitor the entire inventory and to re-order the item in bulk when the inventory falls below a certain threshold, rather than each staff member or department monitoring use and re-ordering items based on the individual use. The use of RFID tags also allows for more accurate accounting of inventory because the scan occurs automatically whenever the cabinet door is opened and closed, and it eliminates the error of staff members forgetting to report item use or accidentally reporting the incorrect amount of items used. By more accurately ordering in bulk, hospitals are able to save money using a volume discount, ordering less often, and centralizing the ordering process to an individual, rather than having the catheter users order new items or report their use to their department.
However, for all of the advantages RFID cabinets provide to hospitals, significant disadvantages persist. In conventional RFID cabinets, the slots which house the medical devices are placed in rows and antenna modules are placed between each of the slots. Whenever the cabinet door is closed, the antennas scan the medical devices and determine how many items are present based on the number of positive signals received from the medical device RFID tags. Problems arise because each antenna must scan its respective row before the next antenna begins the scanning sequence. If each antenna requires approximately four seconds for a scan, and with, hypothetically, five antennas, it will take a total of 20 seconds to scan the entire cabinet because each four-second scan must be complete before the next four-second scan can commence.
This can be particularly problematic in high traffic areas because, while the scan is ongoing, the cabinet door remains locked. If one staff member retrieves an item and closes the cabinet door, the next staff member will need to wait the full 20 seconds before he/she is able to access the cabinet. In high traffic areas, the compounded time lost in waiting for the doors to unlock can be significant. The lost time is detrimental to more important hospital operations. Additionally, by finding a more accurate and faster way to scan a high volume of items, cabinets can be made larger for a more efficient use of space. Using conventional technology, larger cabinets necessitate more time to scan the cabinets, resulting in even more time lost.